Six Poems

Guest and Host

The day she asked me to leave her body
we were watching lorikeets
loop-the-loop and catch noisy fire.
For weeks we’d been taking turns
as guest and host. Recently she had fallen
asleep in a sling of capillaries in my chest
as I climbed a plane tree to find
the signature my father had carved
into a branch the day my mother left
a note, then left. When she told me it was over
I asked if there was anything I could do.
She said No or it might have been Go.
I gathered up the remains of a sentence
about cohabitation, and turned on
the scotopic vision I use for bird watching
at night, then I shut down the reward circuits
...